Cover

Title Page, Copyright Page

Contents

Introduction

Human intelligence usually comes in one of several kinds. The person
who is a genius in mathematics or physics is often not as notable in
the very different disciplines of history or literature. This is understandable
because the stark and necessary abstractions of the former two categories
are quite different ...

Introduction

The present volume contains a number of essays that I have written
on many different subjects during the last fifteen years. But in spite of
their diversity I believe that they all possess a certain community of aim
and deal in one way or another with a common problem. ...

Part 1

I The New Leviathan

The great fact of the twentieth century is the definite emergence of
a new type of civilisation different from anything that the world has
known hitherto. All through the nineteenth century the new forces
which were to transform human life were already at work, but their real
tendency was to a great extent veiled by current modes of thought ...

II The Significance of Bolshevism

The economic crisis of the last two years has proved a godsend to the
Bolsheviks. The years of the New Economic Policy in Russia and of the
post-war boom in the West were a time of disappointment and trial for
the leaders of the communist party. ...

III The World Crisis and the English Tradition

The crisis that has arisen in the modern world during the post-war
period is not merely an economic one. It involves the future of Western
culture as a whole, and, consequently, the fate of humanity. But it is not
a simple or uniform phenomenon. It is not confined to any one state or
any one continent. ...

IV The Passing of Industrialism

The war presumably marks the end of an age no less decisively than
did the wars of the French Revolution. In this case, however, it is not
a venerable and moribund society like the ancien régime that is passing
away, but a transitional order, which was essentially a compromise and
which never attained to a mature and consistent development. ...

Part 2

V Cycles of Civilisation

At the present time the world is divided between four great cultures,
respectively European, Islamic, Indian and Chinese. Although the first
of these has attained a kind of world hegemony, it has not eliminated
the other three, nor has it succeeded in penetrating them internally. ...

VI Religion and the Life of Civilisation

Ever since the rise of the modern scientific movement in the eighteenth
century there has been a tendency among sociologists and historians
of culture to neglect the study of religion in its fundamental social
aspects. The apostles of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment were,
above all, intent on deducing the laws of social life ...

VII Civilisation and Morals

If we make a survey of human history and culture, we see clearly that
every society has possessed a moral code, which is often clearly thought
out and exactly defined. In practically every society in the past there
has been an intimate relation between this moral code and the dominant
religion. ...

VII The Mystery of China

During recent years there has been a remarkable growth of interest
in China and its civilisation among Western peoples. Chinese art and
literature have at last come into their own and are being studied not as
interesting curiosities, but as among the supreme achievements of the
human spirit. ...

IX Rationalism and Intellectualism

Rationalism is usually regarded as the natural enemy of religion; in
fact, rationalists have tended to conceive the history of human thought
in a frankly dualist spirit as a long warfare between the powers of light
and the powers of darkness, in which the cause of rationalism is the
cause of civilisation, science and progress, ...

Part 3

X Islamic Mysticism

During recent years a great deal of attention has been devoted to
the study of Mohammedan mysticism by European scholars. Nor is
it difficult to understand the reason of this attraction, since of all types
of mysticism that of Islam is the richest perhaps in the quantity and
certainly in the quality of its literature. ...

XI On Spiritual Intuition in Christian Philosophy

The problem of spiritual intuition and its reconciliation with the
natural conditions of human knowledge lies at the root of philosophic
thought, and all the great metaphysical systems since the time of Plato
have attempted to find a definitive solution. The subject is no less important
for the theologian, ...

XII St. Augustine and His Age

St. Augustine has often been regarded as standing outside his own
age—as the inaugurator of a new world and the first mediaeval man,
while others, on the contrary, have seen in him rather the heir of the
old classical culture and one of the last representatives of antiquity. ...

XII Christianity and Sex

Western civilisation at the present day is passing through a crisis
which is essentially different from anything that has been previously
experienced. Other societies in the past have changed their social institutions
or their religious beliefs under the influence of external forces
or the slow development of internal growth. ...

XIV Religion and Life

It is often said that Christianity is out of touch with life and that it
no longer satisfies the needs of the modern world. And these criticisms
are symptomatic of a general change of attitude with regard to religious
problems. Men to-day are less interested in the theological and
metaphysical assumptions of religion than in its practical results. ...

XV The Nature and Destiny of Man

In her doctrine of man the Catholic Church has always held the
middle path between two opposing theories, that which makes man an
animal and that which holds him to be a spirit. Catholicism has always
insisted that man’s nature is twofold. He is neither flesh nor spirit, but
a compound of both. ...

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